Optoelectronic systems used for optically communicating between devices typically consist of a driver, an optical light emitting device such as a VCSEL, light coupling elements such as mirrors, gratings and optical waveguides for transporting optical signals from one point to another. An assembly of such optoelectronic system comprises fabricating waveguides and coupling elements on top of a substrate such as a printed wiring board (PWB) and then attaching a VCSEL device on top of such a substrate. The optical light emitted from the VCSEL is coupled into a waveguide on the substrate and is guided in-plane from one side of the substrate to other devices. It is very difficult and often impractical to integrate all of the components of the optoelectronic system such as driver and VCSEL onto a PWB substrate especially when the operating frequencies are beyond the GHz range. An alternate substrate such as silicon eases many of the integration complexities and provides a very high speed solution. A high performance computing system can be created by compactly integrating high speed driver and VCSEL components on a silicon substrate and maintaining optical communication through wave guides on the PWB. This scheme requires being able to couple light from one side of the silicon substrate to the other so that it can be coupled to a waveguide on the PWB.
The present invention enables crucial integration of optical and electronic components on a single substrate that is needed for inter chip optical communication through a backplane. This is done by being able to effectively couple light (used for optical communication) from sources mounted on one side of the substrate to waveguiding elements that may be located on the other side of the same substrate or a completely independent substrate.